‘…identification with the aggressor can be understood as a two-stage process. The first stage is automatic and initiated by trauma, but the second stage is defensive and purposeful. While identification with the aggressor begins as an automatic organismic process, with repeated activation and use, gradually it becomes a defensive process.’
Howell, E. (2014). Ferenczi’s concept of identification with the aggressor: Understanding dissociative structure with interacting victim and abuser self-states. Am J Psychoanal 74, 48–59.
‘Towards his or her parent an abused toddler often shows a striking picture of frozen watchfulness, hyper-alert for what might happen. But some show also an unusual sensitivity to the needs of their parents (Malone, 1966). There are, in fact, good reasons for thinking that some children learn early that it is possible to placate a disturbed and potentially violent mother by constant attention to her wishes.’
Bowlby, J. (2005). A secure base: Clinical applications of attachment theory. London: Routledge.
‘What happens if a mother not only is unable to recognize and fulfill her child’s needs, but is herself in need of assurance? Quite unconsciously, the mother then tries to assuage her own needs through her child (…) What is missing above all is the framework within which the child could experience his feelings and emotions. Instead, he develops something the mother needs, and although this certainly saves his life (by securing the mother’s or the father’s ‘love’) at the time, it may nevertheless prevent him, throughout his life, from being himself.’
Miller, A. (1994). The drama of being a child: The search for the true self. London: Virago.
‘The parts of the self that are split off are those functions that give rise to experiences that are intolerable. Often that means the splitting-off of the capacity to perceive things realistically, especially for the child to see itself realistically. For example, commonly the capacity to feel guilt may be lost in order to lose the sense of guilt.’
Hinshelwood, R. D. (2018). The clinical paradigms of Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott. Abingdon: Routledge.
Splitting is a ‘process by which a mental structure loses its integrity and becomes replaced by two or more part-structures (…) After splitting of the ego, typically only one resulting part-ego is experienced as “self”, the other constituting a (usually) unconscious “split-off part of the ego”.’
Rycroft, C. (1995). Critical dictionary of psychoanalysis (second edition). London: Penguin Books.
‘Invalidating environments contribute to emotional dysregulation by… actively teaching the child to invalidate his or her own experiences by making it necessary for the child to scan the environment for cues about how to act and feel.’
Linehan, M. M., & Koerner, K. (1993). Behavioral theory of borderline personality disorder. In J. Paris (Ed.), Borderline personality disorder: Etiology and treatment (pp. 103-121). Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press.
False self ‘describes the adaptation that the subject has to make in order to live within his social context. In this sense each person to some extent develops a false self, and Winnicott sees the false self as the caretaker and protector of the true self, mediating between the true self and the outside world.’
Skelton, R. (Ed.). (2006). The Edinburgh International Encyclopaedia of Psychoanalysis.
‘The re-introjection of this object, which now represents a combination of a persecutory object and the bad self, reinforces inner persecution.’
Melanie Klein (Klein Archive, PP/KLE, B98).
‘Members of enmeshed families typically describe their families as conflict free, while at the same time, these very units are characterised by high demands for conformity.’
Barbarin, O. A., & Tirado, M. (1985). Enmeshment, family processes, and successful treatment of obesity. Family Relations: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Applied Family Studies, 34(1), 115–121.
‘[P]arents falsely accusing sex abuse (…) were much more likely (…) to have a personality disorder such as Histrionic, Borderline, Passive-Aggressive, or Paranoid.’
Gordon, R. M., Stoffey, R. & Bottinelli, J. (2008). MMPI-2 findings of primitive defenses in alienating parents. The American Journal of Family Therapy, 36:211–228.
‘When fear is an integral part of the parent-child relationship, the child accommodates as a way of adapting to the different situations he or she finds him/herself in with regard to the parent.’
Haliburn, J., & Mears, D. (2012). The story of a therapeutic relationship. In R. Meares (Ed.), Borderline personality disorder and the conversational model (pp. 45-109). New York.: W. W. Norton.
‘Abused and neglected children show behavioral and emotional difficulties that are consistent with effects on the amygdala, such as internalizing problems, heightened anxiety and emotional reactivity, and deficits in emotional processing. Among preschool and elementary school children, [and] adults, a history of childhood abuse and neglect has been associated with dissociation which increases the risk for externalizing behavior in childhood and resistance to treatment for psychiatric conditions later in life.’
Committee on Child Maltreatment Research, Policy, and Practice for the Next Decade: Phase II; Board on Children, Youth, and Families; Committee on Law and Justice; Institute of Medicine; National Research Council; Petersen AC, Joseph J, Feit M, editors. (2014)
‘The “facts” to which the term alienation refers are, objectively, different kinds of dissociation, break or rupture between human beings and their objects, whether the latter be other persons, or the natural world, or their own creations in art, science or society.’
Heinemann, F. H. (1953). Existentialism and the modern predicament. New York: Harper and Brothers.
‘Bion’s communicative version subsumes Klein’s intrapsychic version [of projective identification] and adds the intersubjective dimension of the object’s role in containing and thereby modifying the subject’s ultimate experience of what he has projected.’
Grotstein, J. S. (2005). ‘Projective transidentification’: An extension of the concept of projective identification, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 86:4, 1051-1069.
‘[Some] parents do not have a clear sense of the child as separate, and lack the ability to empathize with the child’s feelings.. Rather, they project their own feelings onto the child, and treat him as if he were either an object or an extension of themselves (…) When the child is treated as an extension of the parent, he may simply adopt the parent’s feeling state.’
Blizard, R. A. (1997, November). The origins of dissociative identity disorder from an object relations and attachment theory perspective.
‘[W]hen parent-child boundaries are violated, the implications for developmental psychopathology are significant. Poor boundaries interfere with the child’s capacity to progress through development which (…) is the defining feature of childhood psychopathology.’
Kerig, P. K. (2005). Implications of parent-child boundary dissolution for developmental psychopathology: Who is the parent and who is the child? New York: Haworth Press.
Nick Woodall 